Friday, March 30, 2012

Craig from
over the fence came bearing gifts just now. One item was a load of snapper he caught
yesterday. The other was a large piece of smoked trevally: he was a bit
apologetic about it as he smoked it last night using a new technique – he’d
added a little maple syrup and brandy to the usual brine and wasn’t sure
we would like it.

I said we would.

So here are the Rolling Stones, live in
Paris in 2003, with Keef delivering the full Chuck Berry:

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

My French is truly execrable but I like to add to my small stock of phrases when I can.
From a piece by Mick Hartley quoting Richard Wolin on revolutionary
tourism I learn that the French for “champagne socialist” is “gauche caviar”. (In fact the French is
the original and the English is a derivation, as is the American “limousine
liberal”. Pleasingly, there is a bar in East Beirut called Gauche Caviar.) Among the revolutionary
tourists cited are – quelle surprise – Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva visiting Mao’s China. Sample:

Barthes observed that, since communism had
cured “alienation,” psychoanalysis had been rendered superfluous in China... In
Les Chinoises (Chinese Women), Kristeva went so far as to justify the traditional
Chinese practice of foot-binding as merely a harmless, female variant of male
circumcision. In any event, remarked Kristeva, Chinese habitudes and mores
could not be judged by Western standards, since the latter were pervaded by
petty bourgeois biases and prejudices.

I wonder what the French for “useful idiots” is. Hartley says of Kristeva:

It’s a reminder that making excuses for the
most extreme manifestations of misogyny, as long as they’re practiced by
non-Western societies, is a form of blindness that has a long and discreditable
history among sections of the feminist left.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Born 27 March 1924, died 3 April 1990, Sarah Vaughan was
imho the best jazz singer ever, with an immaculate technique – pitch, phrasing,
timbre – allied to an extraordinary interpretive imagination. I sat about 10
feet behind her on-stage in the Michael Fowler Centre when she performed with
piano, bass and drums at the Wellington Festival in 1989 – the same festival
where Pierre
Boulez, who turned 87 yesterday, conducted his Ensemble InterContemporain in
Birtwistle, Boulez and someone else, probably Messiaen.

Vaughan was fantastic. Of course she was,
but what I really appreciated was how often she turned around to us in the
cheap seats and made sure that we were included. I could just about touch her
pianist. A year later she was dead.

Here is the young Sarah Vaughan singing
“Over the Rainbow” which is not her core repertoire but it shows her warmth, technique
and gorgeous tone:

And here she is a few years later with “I
Got Rhythm”. Who could ask for anything more?:

Monday, March 26, 2012

Sam Leith reviewsStrindberg: a life (Yale), Sue Prideaux’s biography of the 19th-century
playwright August Strindberg. All I knew about him was that he was a Swede who
wrote a play called Miss Julie. I
figured him for a gloomy sort, Ibsen without the jokes with added misogyny. But
no:

Strindberg was attacked by feminist
contemporaries not because he wanted to keep women down, but because his ideas
for female emancipation went far beyond what they found comfortable. And in
addition to Miss Julie he wrote 60
plays, three books of poetry, 18 novels, nine autobiographies, 10,000 extant
letters, tons of journalism ... and the contents of a green flannel sack he
hauled around after him, described thus by his second wife:

“About one yard in length, with gentle
billowing valleys and summits and fastened by a cord. It contained all his
manuscripts. It contained his theory that plants have nerves. It contained his
theory that elements can be split. It contained theories that refute Newton and
God himself.”

So, more interesting than one had supposed.
Leith summarises the life thus:

Born in 1849, he had a horrible childhood,
and was bullied by both his parents. He rejected his father’s snobbery and his
mother’s pietism. He was, for the most part, kind. Even when he was flat broke,
he bought handfuls of cherries twice a day to feed a bear in the zoo that he
had become fond of. The bear was called Martin. When Strindberg behaved badly —
as he did towards his first wife, Siri and their children — guilt weighed on
him. Having once been falsely accused of stealing a peacock, 18 years later he
startled a bookseller by exclaiming at random: ‘I have never stolen a live
peacock!’

Nothing was ever simple for him. He fell in
with crooks, swindlers and Satanists. When he was accused of impregnating an
underage girl, he denounced his blackmailer to a policeman — who himself turned
out to be being blackmailed by the same man. Strindberg was repeatedly sued for
blasphemy. {. . .]

He
lived, gregariously, in Stockholm, Paris and Berlin — everywhere he went
cultivating a more or less drunken salon of some sort. His love life was a
non-stop disaster, and his finances were always precarious — a clue to the
reason for which can be discerned in a triumphant letter he wrote to his wife:
‘I’ve succeeded in borrowing some money, so we are debt-free!’

Leith ends by saying:

you can see in the prose how much fun the
author is having with Strindberg. Anyone reading her marvellous book will have
that much fun too.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Terence Blacker seems a good
egg – writes books for adults and children, active member of PEN, helped
publish Jerzy Kosinski, writes and sings amusing songs such as “Sad Old Bastards with Guitars”, and has
a lively blog. A recent post suggests that the truth about creative writing is
that, as William Goldman said of Hollywood, nobody
knows anything: Blacker goes on to offer a wonderfully contradictory selection
of quotes from writers on writing.

Paul
Litterick reads the Auckland University student newspaper Craccum so you don’t have to. It’s
not like it used to be, and the new editor plagiarises Chairman Mao, possibly
a first for Craccum and New Zealand
journalism in general. Sample (from the editor, not Paul or Mao: sorry, can’t
find it online but Paul swears the spelling, punctuation and grammar are as in
the original):

Ifyou ever try and do something serious and yet slightly outside of the
perimeters of normality’s boundaries, if you ever try and address an issue that
is of vital and immediate importance yet feel as if a petition or operating
within the usual beurocratic process won’t quite be sufficient, you can be sure
when mainstream media come to ‘report’ on your activities they will be quick to
interview the man in the dress.

Parnell/Remuera has the NZ Herald’s Shelley
Bridgeman (full background via Cactus Kate here)
who recently revealed that she was having trouble reading text on an iPhone so
thought she needed to get her eyes tested:

Having always enjoyed excellent eyesight, I
wasn’t sure where to begin. I made an appointment at my GP. . .

Hey sister. If you see me sporting a curled lip and vague sneer while squinting
at you in the supermarket checkout line, know this. I am actively judging you.

It won’t just be your heaving trolley
stuffed full of processed, sugary, tooth-decaying death that I am condemning
you for. It will also be because you boldly and proudly placed its close
partner in crime on the top of your junk pile. Just what is the perfect
condiment to your toxic take-home fodder? The women’s mag, of course. [. . .]

It’s a really strange world, don’t you
think, when people know more about Angelina Jolie’s right leg than the plight
of the 200-plus species going extinct every day?

Or why hairdressers can’t even begin to
conceptualise the fact that some of their female customers might actually
prefer to read a National Geographic
or a New Yorker while their hair is
being coloured?

Maybe I’m missing something. Does my
intellectual snobbery just need a good dose of lightening up and chilling out?

Rachel, Rachel. Don’t tempt us.

Sorry, sister, but I guess I’m just an
uptight, all-knowing harridan. Might I be so bold as to suggest your mindless
escapism doesn’t bring you joy. You want fluff? Go and stroke a real live whio
rather than just foolishly handing over the $10 note to buy this rubbish. Get
outside and see some non-human wonders before they’re gone.

Above all, stop buying something that makes
you feel worse about yourself every time you pick it up. Follow my sage advice for
free. Three words. Just for you. Here they are.

Get a life.

Superb. How long before Rachel Stewart gets a column
in the Sunday Star-Times?

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple
co-founder Steve Jobs sold 379,000 copies in the US in its first week on
bookshop shelves, BookScan US data has revealed. [. . .]

Despite being on sale for just six days in
the US, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive
Biography is already the 18th bestselling book of the year. [. . .]

Earlier today (2nd November), The Bookseller revealed that the UK
edition of the book became one of the fastest-selling non-fiction books since
records began thanks to a sale of 37,244 copies in its first week on release.

Friday, March 23, 2012

So here is Nick Lowe with Wilco and Mavis Staples rehearsing the Band’s classic
song “The Weight” backstage at the Civic Opera House in Chicago in December
2011. Jeff Tweedy claims in the March issue of Word magazine that this was their
first run-through:

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Mick Hartley on “honour”
killings in England. It’s always the women who are killed to save the
family’s honour, never the men. And it’s women’s behaviour that needs to be
controlled, not men’s. Why would that be? Sample:

The suicide rate amongst south Asian women
in Britain is three times the national average, as women who see no other way
out of an abusive marriage take what they see as the only way out and kill
themselves.

Michael
Wolff in the Guardian tries to defend
Mike
Daisey, the actor whose show The
Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs about Apple in China has been shown to
be economical with the truth:

Most journalists are terrible writers.
Their copy is either overhauled by diligent editors, which produces something
formulaic and generic, or not, and then it is often a sludge of convolutions
and clichés, a graveyard of prose. This is the product that is so intensely,
with almost religious fervor,
defended by, well, journalists themselves. [. . . .]

Journalism today speaks to no one as
passionately as it speaks to other journalists. Fewer and fewer people believe
it, feel informed or entertained by it, or find themselves compelled to seek it
out. The journalism priests would say that one reason for our ever-shrinking
following is because sinners in the profession have undermined our credibility.

I would say it is because journalism –
calling it so is a recent and self-serving bit of professional elevation – is
not our real job; writing is. And it is not Mike Daisey's factual lapses that
we should be so focused on, but, rather, how he writes so well.

“He writes so well”. That’s all right,
then. Never mind the truth value.

John Pilger took friends to his homein Italy. They were sitting on the patio
drinking wine. “That’s my vineyard at the end of this garden,” points out
Pilger.“The wine you are drinking comes
from there.”

“Hmmm,” said one of his friends taking a
sip. “Doesn’t travel well, does it?”

[. . .] a 19-year-old British man was
arrested in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, for having posted something on his
Facebook [page] which apparently constituted, in the eyes of the police, a
‘racially aggravated public order offence’. A spokesman for West Yorkshire
Police said that Azhar Ahmed had written something about the press coverage
afforded to the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan compared to the, in
his view, scanty coverage accorded to the murder of Afghan civilians by a
deranged US soldier. And the unnamed copper concluded: ‘He didn’t make his
point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother.’

Now, this is obviously a problem for
journalists. I didn’t know the police had the powers to arrest people who don’t
make their points very well. If so, that’s the Guardian closed down overnight.

It worked out good, you know, about 25 or
26 million records later. I guess it worked out all right.

After Hazlewood went to the Great Studio in
the Sky, Hawley paid tribute in the Guardian.
Sample:

I asked him about how he got that great
reverb sound on his early records and he said they used to rent a grain store
from a farmer that they knew. The funny side of it was they used to hire
someone with a pellet gun to shoot the birds off it so they didn’t make any
noise.

I remember asking him about his favourite
cover of one of his songs because there’s so many. He just goes: ‘Well, they’re
all shit. [Pause] In fact, the originals weren’t much better.’

He went on: ‘Actually, there is one that
was great. My son called me from Las Vegas once and said: “Pops you’ve got to
get yourself down here. There’s a girl in a club doing a cover of ‘These Boots
Are Made for Walking’”. I said, why the fuck do I have to get on a flight from
Phoenix to Las Vegas to see someone do a crappy version of one of Nancy’s tunes
that I wrote? And he said, “Yeah, but dad, you’ve never seen it done with a
girl playing piano with her breasts.”’

If you don’t know Hawley’s music, I
thoroughly recommend investigating it. NZ crime writer Ben Sanders is a fan too,
judging by the reference in his 2011 novel By
Any Means. Here is Hawley with the title track of his 2005 album Coles Corner:

Monday, March 19, 2012

the gene pool among captive African elephants has
grown woefully small. A single bull named Jackson has sired many of the calves
born in the United States in the past decade, and scientists say new bloodlines
are needed to avoid future inbreeding among his many progeny.

So the Pittsburgh Zoo, which keeps Jackson
at a conservation centre a little way outside the city, has joined an
international effort to establish North America’s first elephant sperm bank.
The plan is to distribute from it semen collected from wild elephants in South
Africa and frozen. Project Frozen Dumbo, started two years ago and led by a
German researcher, has already set up an elephant sperm bank in France in the hope
of resolving a similar predicament in Europe. [. . .]

Just 39 of the 213 African elephants
believed to live in North America’s zoos, circuses and a few private parks are
bulls, and even fewer of them are suitable for breeding. Jackson stands out for
his “fantastic libido” and highly productive semen, says Deborah Olson, who
heads International Elephant Foundation, a conservation group. But this means
that too many of the existing elephant stock are now related to him.

So here are Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra
singing “Jackson” from their classic album Nancy
& Lee, recorded in 1968 when she was hotter than a pepper sprout:

And here are Jenny
Morris and INXS in 1985 with the same song. If you watch closely you will
understand why I always say that the worst job I have ever had is playing guitar on-stage behind Jenny. It was very difficult to concentrate on the fretboard:

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Nigel
Williams on what it was like to work with William Golding on the stage
version of Lord of the Flies. Sample:

He went backstage afterwards and said to
the boys, “Did you like being little savages?” “Ye-e-eahhh!!” they shouted. “Ah,”
he said, “but you wouldn’t like to be savages all the time – would you now?”
They looked, suddenly, like the boys in the story do when the adult comes to
rescue them at the end – cowed and, indeed, awed by what the world might hold
in store.

Mike
Daisey on his hit theatre show/podcast The
Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs about Apple in China:

I'm not going to say that I didn’t take a
few shortcuts in my passion to be heard.

Hey, it’s worked well all these years for
Winston Peters.

Via IIML, Cheryl Bernstein tweets a
quote from Alan Mulgan’s Home: a New
Zealander’s adventure, published in 1934. Even though he was born in
Katikati, close to my hometown Tauranga, I’d always thought Mulgan a very dull fellow –
all that banging on about England being Home meant nothing to my generation –
but no, he was just like the rest of us:

I used to wander about Chelsea and look for
green and white doors and fantastic knockers.

David
Rieff on Kony 2012argues that “the road
to hell is paved with viral videos”; Charlie Beckett of the LSE has more.
Charlie Brooker has a go too on
Channel 4’s 10 O’Clock Live, with a devastating
selection of clips from previous Invisible Children campaigns and funny
commentary. Sample:

“What the fuck?” doesn’t begin to cover
that. So, in summary, Invisible Children are expert propagandists, with what
seems to be a covert religious agenda, advocating military actions…

There is much more.

This
is the only thing that makes me want to go to the Olympics if I win Powerball
next Saturday: the first complete performance of Stockhausen’s opera Mittwoch aus Licht (Wednesday from
Light) which includes the Helicopter Quartet mentioned here
before (with a YouTube clip). That’s right, the members of a string quartet
perform separately in four helicopters a-hovering.

So here are Cream in 2005 with “Sleepy Time”, 39 years after
they recorded it for their debut album Fresh Cream in 1966. The guitarist may
look familiar because he is Eric Clapton; the drummer is Ginger Baker, the
bassist and singer is Jack Bruce, who wrote the song. Bass and drums famously
hate each other, but then it was like that in almost every band I’ve been in.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Paul Litterick at the Fundy Post has a bit
to say about celebs who get free entry to exhibitions at the Auckland City
Art Gallery they clearly could not care less about but may possibly
tweet about. Sample:

Yes, but what is Sally Ridge for? I only
ask because she seems so present and yet so absent. There she goes, there she
goes again: you can always find her in the camera at parties, grinning and
putting her head close to that of one or several of her BFFs. But what does she
do in daylight? [. . .]

She is a conduit. She will channel the wishes of [ACAG director
Chris] Saines to her audience, her teeming mass of 1309 Twitter followers.
Obviously tiring of the sort of people who go to his gallery all the time – art
lovers – Director Saines has struck out forcefully moving forward to optimise
Ms Ridge and thus outreach her fans.

I hope to see the show From Degas to Dali on Wednesday, unless I have to queue. I am not
English; I do not queue. Not even for Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard and Rouault. On
the other hand: there is Bacon. Also Freud, Wyndham Lewis and Spencer. Don’t
get to see them too often. Tough call.

Friday, March 16, 2012

SIR – Your leader regarding Argentina’s
dodgy inflation figures asked us to imagine a world without statistics (“Don’t lie to me, Argentina”,
February 25th). In such an imaginary world, “governments would fumble in the
dark, investors would waste money and electorates would struggle to hold their
political leaders to account”. Please tell me: how exactly would that be
different from the real world?

Thursday, March 15, 2012

The New Zealand literary magazine Sport is 40. Not in years, but in issues. The 40th one is out now and is a cracker. Thoroughly
recommended as a sampler: in its 452 pages it features 23 contemporary German
writers, to mark New Zealand’s role as guest of honour at this year’s Frankfurt
Book Fair, and fiction, poems and essays by 52 New Zealand writers. There are
established names such as Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Knox, Damien Wilkins, Kate Camp
and Andrew Johnston (yay); up-and-comers such as Pip Adam, Tima Makeriti, Helen
Heath and Anna Taylor (yay). Good to see Virginia Were and Elizabeth Nannestad again;
and there is an essay on Nigel Cox by André Gifkins. Last time I saw André he
was in a stroller. Sport 40 is $40 in print but here
you can get the ebook version for $15. Why wouldn’t you?

How to write an
investment newsletter: Emphasize everything that can go wrong. Relate to your audience – elderly men who are
being passed by in this world and need the reassurance that the world is going
down the tubes, rather than evolving without them. Gold mustn’t necessarily be the subject of
each letter but it should at least be alluded to or serve as the unwritten
subtext.

Home Paddock, who is a farmer, has a
view on Labour’s proposed law on farm ownership which would require Johnny
Foreigner to show that his purchase “would result in the creation of a
substantial number of additional jobs in New Zealand or a substantial increase
in exports from new technology or products associated with the purchase”. Sample:

Why don’t they just ban sales to foreigners
outright?

It would be almost impossible to create a
substantial number – whatever that might be – of additional jobs here from the
purchase of a farm; new technology doesn’t necessarily increase exports –
though it might make processing them more efficient and reduce jobs in the
process.

It’s a funny thing but the people I know
who are opposed to foreigners buying New Zealand farms live in places like Grey
Lynn and Herne Bay and wouldn’t know a Friesian from a Romney. People who live
and work on farms are more relaxed about it – the Crafars were not a great
advertisement for the benefits of local ownership. One city friend urges me to
support the Save Our Farms campaign, but people who live and work on farms tend
to regard their farms as their farms,
not “ours”. It’s that private property concept.

Architecture writer Elizabeth Farrelly, one
of our exports to Oz, begins her
latest column in the Sydney Morning
Herald:

Last Thursday, the conjunction of
Australian Women's History Month and International Women’s Day, was also the
day of Sydney's Great Deluge. Nature wept. She stormed and stamped her feet.
Yea, and mightily she flooded. What was she trying to tell us?

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Do you want “smooth and
attractive feet”? I live in the
country so do not keep up with beauty treatments
but apparently fish pedicures are all the rage overseas now. More popular than fish, even. Harry
Wallop reports
that some English towns – Newbury, Windermere, Kidderminster, Aylesbury,
Brentwood and Wakefield – have a fish pedicure salon but no fishmonger:

There are 268 fish pedicure salons,
according to an analysis of business directories by the Daily Telegraph. Though this is fewer than the 992 fishmongers, as
calculated by the Grocer magazine, it
represents an explosive level of growth, considering the first salon opened in
the UK just two years ago. [. . . ]

The procedure, which is meant to leave
clients with smooth and attractive feet, has become very fashionable and many
salons hire themselves out for hen nights.

It involves customers placing their feet
and ankles in a tank full of about 200 fish, usually Garra Rufa, a type of tiny
carp, which nibble away at dead skin.

Earlier this year the Health Protection
Agency said it was concerned the procedure could spread diseases from person to
person through open wounds, though it said it was unaware of any cases of
infection.

Although the Sun has been carping on about warnings and alerts, the newspaper
seems to have overestimated the scale of the risk, which health experts have
described as being “extremely low”. [. . .].

While the report did acknowledge that the
risk of infections could not be completely ruled out, it is important to view
this in context and not be reeled in by fishy headlines.

Puntastic. New Zealand’s own intrepid beauty
investigator Stephanie Kimpton
tried it out in Thailand – that is her foot in the photo above:

I had read about fish pedicures somewhere
and when on holiday in Thailand, I saw them. 100 Thai Baht (NZ$4) for 10
minutes. Sold!

Fish therapy has been in Asia for years. The
Garra Rufa fish don’t have teeth. They suck at the skin and lift away dead
cells revealing nice smooth skin underneath.

Being ticklish and known to boot my
pedicurist in the head on the odd occasion, I knew procrastination would be
dangerous. I paid my money and got my feet into the tank.

If I knew what I knew now, I wouldn’t do
it. Those toothless piranhas are hungry little suckers. They swarmed at my
feet, between my toes and up my legs. The nibbling/sucking sensation was not
pleasant. It didn’t hurt. It was just very strange. [. . .]

I spoke to a New Zealander on holiday whose
husband gave it a go and shared the same tank as her. She said the fish had a
party on his feet and completely ignored hers. Could be the fact that his
presented a feast, whilst hers were a famine. So, if you’re going to try it,
don’t share with someone who has neglected feet or you won’t get your money’s
worth.

In an unprovoked attack, he also struck
Tory councillor Luke MacKenzie and fellow Labour MP and party whip Phillip
Wilson. He also swung a punch at Tory MP Alec Shelbrooke which missed but
grazed his head.

When the police arrived he told them, “You
can’t touch me I’m an MP”, and said he had hit Mr Andrew because “He deserved
it”. [. . .]

The brawl started when Stuart Niven, a
leading amateur opera singer, who was with Joyce, began singing in the bar
around 10.30pm.

There were a number of Conservative MP and
the guests at surrounding tables and Joyce appeared to think they objected,
announcing: “There are too many Tories in this bar.”

Mr Andrew described Joyce as being “more
drunk than anyone I have seen in my life”.

Joyce is in trouble again and is possibly
even more embarrassed. The subhead on thisDaily Mail story says it all:

In short, two years ago he was bonking Meg
Lauder, a 17-year-old party activist who for some reason has now gone public
with the tale. Sad and bad behaviour, yes, but the story fascinates for the
insight it gives us into English courtship and the decorating instincts of Labour’s
young activists. First, the home décor:

Back in her bedroom at home, its walls
decorated with political posters, featuring Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Chairman
Mao and Alistair Darling…

Now for the MP’s seduction technique:

Three days later, she duly turned up at his
flat during a free period from school, still wearing her school uniform. She
claims Joyce told her to take off her school tie because ‘it made her look so
young’. After a quick lunch of filled rolls in front of the BBC news, he
suddenly started kissing her.

That seems to be all that happened as Meg had
to go back to school for a religiousstudies class. However, three days later she returned to his flat:

where she stayed overnight after telling
her parents she was going to a party and sleeping over with a friend. She says: ‘I knew what I was doing and
accepted what was going to happen. We started kissing on the couch and then he
said he had “something to show me”.

‘I knew what he meant, but I felt like
cringing at his attempt at humour. We went through to the bedroom: one thing
led to another, and we had sex.

‘There was no romance, it was almost formal
and functional – nothing like I expected and nothing to write home about. It
didn’t feel like it was a new boyfriend or lover.’

Afterwards, Joyce ordered a pizza and they
watched a documentary.

Isn’t that last sentence depressing. At
least neither of them had a cigarette.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Most of us will have seen or at least
received a link to that half-hour “Get Kony” viral video from Invisible
Children via email or Facebook. Kony is (possibly was – one hopes that he is
past tense) a horrible, horrible man but there are big questions about the
video’s accuracy, whether it is helpful and also about the money involved. Mick
Hartley takes an
austere view: to see why, just follow his link to the photo of the Invisible
Children chaps posing with guns: wankers, frankly. Grant Oyston of Acadia
University has a
massively detailed post with many links about what is wrong with Invisible
Children (sample: “people supporting KONY 2012 probably don’t realize they’re
supporting the Ugandan military who are themselves raping and looting away”). Even
the Sydney Morning Herald has weighed
in. Sample quote:

Others take issue with the amount of money
Invisible Children dedicates to officer salaries, filmmaking costs and travel,
as opposed to on-the-ground programs to help rebuild the lives of people
traumatised by decades of conflict. Some have called the video a pitch-perfect
appeal to so-called slacktivism, a pejorative term for armchair activism by a
younger generation, often online.

The UK cabinet minister and arts grandee Norman
St John-Stevas has died. The English do good obituaries and the Daily Telegraphdoes
not disappoint:

Irrepressible, witty and disarmingly
immodest, Lord St John was an expert on much else besides aesthetics. In the
1990s, during the break-up of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales,
he became known for his frequent television appearances in which he would give
the nation the benefit of his expertise on the attendant constitutional
implications, a role in which he claimed extensive knowledge of the inner
workings and private thoughts of the Royal family.

It was never entirely clear how much direct
access he had, though he was certainly a great friend of Princess Margaret,
whose framed likeness, prominently displayed behind him, graced many an
official photograph.

He was also a great friend of Dorothy:

He liked to tell the story of how he asked
to be excused from a meeting because he had a reception to go to. “But I’m
going to the same function,” protested Mrs Thatcher. “Yes, but it takes me so
much longer to change,” replied St John-Stevas. Yet it seemed that Mrs Thatcher
did not see the need for a licensed jester — particularly one so well-known for
his indiscretions with the press over lunch.

For St John-Stevas did not so much leak as
gush, providing an entertaining running commentary on the foibles of his
colleagues (on whom he bestowed nicknames), spiced up with fruity society
tittle-tattle. “The trouble with you, Norman,” one listener complained, “is
that you’re such a compulsive name dropper.” “The Queen said exactly the same
to me yesterday,” came the rejoinder.

At the other end of the political spectrum,
David
Thompson quotes Guardian columnist Laurie Pennie’s Twitter feed:

In a café. Being chatted up by aggressive
lesbian waitress. My analysis of gender, privilege and travel has not prepared
me for this.

Next tweet hastens to add:

Hasten to add: not all lesbian waitresses
are aggressive. This one is. She’s making lewd comments about me to her
colleagues in Spanish.

But it wasn’t just the practicalities of
performance which led to Byrd’s manner of composition, it was also his way of
thinking. He described how in his favoured texts there is such a deep and
hidden force that the right notes would occur to him spontaneously. The same
could be said about Purcell’s and Britten’s response to texts, but whereas with
them the result was solo singers standing on a stage projecting outwards, Byrd
thought of small groups – vocal ensembles or voices with viol accompaniment –
turning inwards. He liked to strip meaning to its essence, and then express it
through the interraction of several melodic lines in a polyphonic web – a
method which compares sharply with the solo, hummable, melodic lines of opera
and oratorio so beloved of Purcell and Britten.

Astonishing, if you can bear to watch (not
recommended), how quickly even at the Daily
Telegraph comments on a blog descend into abuse. Let us avert our eyes and instead
watch and listen to the Tallis Scholars sing the heavenly Kyrie from Byrd’s Mass for
Four Voices:

It gets so quiet during the second movement
of the Brahms Symphony No. 2, you could almost hear a pin drop.

Or a sneeze. Or a fist hitting a face.

Such was the case Thursday night at
Orchestra Hall in a ruckus the Chicago Symphony Orchestra officially described
as “an incident” between “two patrons.” But shocked concert-goers and police
called it a fist fight in one of the boxes — where the elite typically sit and
expect a more refined experience.

Just as the second movement was drawing to
a gentle close — with Music Director Riccardo Muti at the podium — a man in his
30s, according to police, started punching a 67-year-old man inside one of the
boxes.[. . . ]

The concert never stopped, but Muti shot a
glance over his left shoulder toward the box where the punches were thrown. One
concert-goer described the look as “dagger eyes.”

I wonder what the Italian for “dagger eyes” is. Riccardo Muti was born in Naples. The fighters are lucky he wasn’t born in Palermo.

Nine was bored late afternoon because her
sister was at school camp, there was no one else close by to play with, homework
was all done, she’d finished reading her book and so – “Let’s make a cake.” So
we did. Second time for her, first time in 30 years for me. All went well until
I took it out of the oven. The top had split.

In his On
Food & Cooking: the science & lore of the kitchenHarold McGee
is eloquent on how this happens but it was a horse/stable door issue. Too late,
damage done. How to salvage it? Simple. Green glace cherries for eyes and we
have a chocolate cake with a smile:

So here are Cake with their really rather
good version of “I Will Survive”, live in San Francisco in 2004:

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Three items of good
news from the book world:1. Jack
Lasenby has won the Storylines Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-loved Book
for 2012, for Uncle Trev which was
the first in a series of five collections of yarns about rural New Zealand and,
frankly, how much fun it is lying to children. That’s Jack above at the launch of Uncle Trev at Unity Books in Auckland in
1991. Kevin Ireland is on the right, launching the book; Christine Cole Catley,
the publisher, is on the left.

2. Paul Thomas has gone straight into #1 in the NZ
bestseller list with his new novel Death
on Demand (Hachette). I thoroughly recommend it – it’s a cracker. I hope he
is now writing a sequel.

3. The shortlist
for the NZ Post Children’s Book Awards includes several friends and Tina
Matthews. If the name rings a faint bell, she was the Tina Weymouth of
her day – she played bass in the Crocodiles, with Jenny
Morris (vocals), Tony Backhouse and Fane
Flaws (guitar), Peter Dasent (keyboards) and Bruno Lawrence (drums). They made
great records but boy, you should have seen them live.

So here are the Crocodiles one more time (any
excuse will do) with “Tears”. That’s
Tony B on the left with the Strat, Fane F on the right with the Gibson Les Paul
goldtop. It’s pretty clear which one is Peter D, which is Bruno L and which is
Tina M.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

To be precise, the cat shat on the carpet
in the children’s room. Three major deposits, as if from a medium-sized dog.

One tries to be positive and look for the silver lining. Oh, there it is – she must
be unwell. Perhaps she’ll die. Regular readers with long memories will know how I
feel about the cat. That is her above with Nine.

After I had cleaned it all up in time to make the children’s dinner, Seven
announced that she needed to do some baking for school camp tomorrow. Cupcakes,
she thought. Swell (not actually the word used), I thought, there goes the
dinner plan and here comes chaos in the kitchen.

Here are the results (glassworks behind by
Sam Ireland and, to the left, Garry Nash):

Ravel was born in Ciboure,
a Basque town in south-west France, on 7 March 1875 and died in Paris on 28
December 1937. We all know Bolero but
it’s worth exploring the piano concertos, in fact all the piano music, in fact
all the orchestral music. The chamber music is all wonderful too. He once said:

I am not one of the great composers. All
the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work – the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively
very little . . . and at that, I did it with a great deal of difficulty. I did
my work slowly, drop by drop. I have torn all of it out of me by pieces. . .
and now I cannot do any more, and it does not give me any pleasure.

Which explains his relatively small output,
but what an output. Here is Martha
Argerich performing Ravel’s Jeux
d’eau in 1977:

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

If you like stock-car racing, it’s the politics
for you. The Australianreports that “Julia Gillard's cabinet ministers have defended her decision to appoint
former NSW Premier Bob Carr to the role of foreign minister”. Indeed they have.
Let’s see how health minister Tanya Plibersek defends the decision:

Commenting on reports that Mr Carr had
called the Dalai Lama a “cunning monk” in his blog, Thoughtlines, Ms Plibersek
said it was unhelpful to trawl through all of Mr Carr’s former comments on
foreign affairs.

“I know that the comment you are referring
to is one where our future foreign minister Bob Carr has suggested that
parliamentarians shouldn’t meet with the Dalai Lama, Ms Plibersek said.

“We disagree on that, but I don’t think its
particularly productive to go back over every single thing he has written in
Thoughtlines and say yes or no do you agree, is this Labor policy?”

She defended the incoming minister, who is
understood to have made a number of controversial comments, including
criticising US President Barack Obama and the humanitarian intervention in
Libya.

“I think it’s just fantastic that we have a
new senator and a new foreign minister who is such an intelligent man,” she
said.

“I am absolutely thrilled that we have a
real thinker who is on the record with a variety of very interesting positions,”
she said.

“A variety of interesting positions” must
be the euphemism of the week.

Pigeon
Blog is what is says: a blog by a pigeon, called Brian, about pigeons. It
is very funny. Here
Brian interviews Janet and Jim Pigeon about daylight saving:

I asked Janet if she thought the clocks
going back had any impact on the number of depressed pigeons in London:

“Absolutely. I think pigeons just find the
whole thing quite confusing. One day they’re out happily tucking into dinner.
Then they go out at the same time the next day, and it’s dark. I think it
really throws pigeons, so those prone to depression are bound to suffer.”

Jim, looking somewhat grayer these days,
agreed:

“Yeah. Totally. You can see it everywhere.
Soon as it happens, loads of miserable pigeons. Millions of them, especially in
King’s Cross. No-one gives a shit we get an hour extra on the ledge in the
morning. Only thing that happens is the sun comes up earlier than it’s meant
to. Load of old bollocks.”

So, there you have it. Proof from those in
the know. You wait. This time next week, just watch out for the number of
vacant looking pigeons shuffling about aimlessly through the streets of London.
Anyone out there got any suggestions, let me know, and before you say it, we’ve
tried staring at street lamps.

And then this,
about the recent gathering of the Davids. Shown here are David
from Cardiff on the left, and David from Swansea on the right.

Friday, March 2, 2012

On Taobao, China’s largest
consumer-to-consumer online marketplace, merchants are offering users of QQ,
the world’s largest instant messaging tool, a service to hack into their
accounts and make it appear as if they were sending their posts from an iPhone.

“The iPhone is too expensive. If you don’t
want to spend that money, then fake it!” says the advert of one Shanghai-based
vendor. The service is Rmb6 to Rmb8 a month (around $1), and all you have to do
is submit your QQ username and password. [… That] consumers would be willing to
give their QQ passwords away just to help them pretend they are using an iPhone
says a lot about the pent-up demand out there.

Print newspaper ads have fallen by
two-thirds from $60 billion in the late-1990s to $20 billion in 2011. […] For
decades, newspapers relied on a simple cross-subsidy to pay for their coverage.
You can't make much money advertising against A1 stories like bombings in
Afghanistan and school shootings and deficit reduction. Those stories are the door
through which readers walk to find stories that can take the ads: the car
section, the style section, the travel section, and the classifieds. But ad
dollars started flowing to websites that gave people their car, style, travel,
or classifieds directly. So did the readers. And down went print.

There are two graphs. The first, which Whale
Oil has posted nice and big, shows “Print Advertising Revenue Adjusted for Inflation, 1950 to
2011”: falling off a cliff. The second, too big to show here but fascinating, simply shows “Weekday
Newspaper Circulation 1990 to 2010” for the Wall
Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Daily News
and New York Post. It’s amazing. The
WSJ is almost off the scale with more than two million paid copies a day – eat
your heart out, Grannie – well above the
second-placed NYT which has crashed
to about 900,000. The WSJ figures
include paid online subscribers. The LAT
has about half the paid sales it had 20 years ago. Two possible, not
incompatible, conclusions: print news is a sunset industry; and a paywall works.
(The original research by Mark Perry of the University of Michigan is here.)

This may be the best photo of Nick Cave
ever. Not the sharpest or most artfully composed, just the best. It is from the
Watford Observer and was taken
to mark the occasion of Julie Howell, who has multiple sclerosis and
runs a social media company that helps
people with disabilities, being recognised as “Alumnus of the Year 2012” by the
Brighton Graduate Association. Mr Cave, a Brighton resident (Hove, to be precise),
received an honorary degree, his
third, and isn’t mentioned until the seventh paragraph.

Seriously, people who don’t understand the
concept of opportunity costs just shouldn’t be allowed to go outside
unaccompanied.

Carole at Carole’s Chatter posts her favourite Flanders & Swann songs. Many of us of a certain age love Flanders
& Swann – “I’m a Gnu”, “A Song of Reproduction”, “The Reluctant
Cannibal”, “The Hippopotamus Song” (“Mud, mud, glorious mud”) and the rest. All
their stuff is available on CD but for some reason the
one video of them in performance, in April l967 after their last show on
Broadway performing what must have been “At the Drop of Another Hat”, has never
made it to DVD. Amazon has three copies of the VHS tape for sale, starting at
£58. Baffling that it hasn’t been digitised. I’d buy it.

So here are Michael Flanders and Donald Swann
in a clip from that lost show performing “Madeira M’Dear”. The lyrics are here, not
that you need thembecause Flanders’
enunciation is so clear. Truly, he was the Neil
Hannon of his day.